Jenny Drumgoole’s subversive videos make us smile. The artist stars in her videos as a larger than life parody of a kind of super woman or super adolescent. She gives her character a task in some contest or other (Wing Bowl, Paula Deene Real Women of Philadelphia online recipe contest) and voila, she’s off and running with funny, visceral videos that sample from archival film footage as need be to mix it up. (See Drumgoole’s videos here). Her slimy and ridiculous recipes for cream cheese dishes will have you hesitate the next time you reach for the white spread in the dairy case. But these videos, while slapstick in nature, have a message as well. They are anti-corporate in the Stephen Colbert tradition. Jenny is exposing something (usually something seedy) about the corporate contest or about society’s excesses.

This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. The slide show is edited by artblog Intern Alison McMenamin. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks also to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support and for sharing artblog radio episodes on the arts & culture page of their community news site NewsWorks.org. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes.